The National Accord bloc of five opposition parties yesterday resumed street protests with a rally in central Yerevan and declared its intention to continue such rallies on a regular basis. Dashnaksutiun leader Ruben Hakopian announced that the five parties plan to join with a wide... MORE

Communist parliamentarian Viktor Ilyukhin has temporarily dropped his campaign for President Yeltsin's ouster and is instead trying to get the president to dismiss controversial billionaire Boris Berezovsky from his post as deputy secretary of Russia's Security Council. Ilyukhin alleges that Berezovsky did not give up... MORE

The deputy director of Rosenergoatom declared at a news conference yesterday that Russia's nuclear power plants have the third best safety record in the world -- after Japan and Germany. Boris Antonov attributed the high standards to the country's ongoing nuclear modernization and reconstruction efforts.... MORE

Yesterday a Russian official announced that the U.S. and Russia had agreed during the recent Washington meeting of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission on plans to increase by five times the capacity of the Murmansk region to neutralize liquid radioactive waste. Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, chairman of the State... MORE

Russia's Foreign Ministry yesterday discounted the recent announcement by Bulgaria's government that it intends to seek NATO membership. A ministry spokesman described the announcement as a "political declaration" by a caretaker government that, he intimated, is unlikely ultimately to be approved by parliament. He suggested... MORE

China yesterday condemned as interference in its internal affairs a protest rally in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek against the Chinese authorities' crackdown on Uighur demonstrators in the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. Uighurs in Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan, and exiles from Xinjiang in those countries, are discussing forming an... MORE

In three separate incidents last night in Dushanbe, unidentified gunmen assassinated a Lt. Col. of the Russian border troops, two off-duty guards of the U.S. embassy (ethnic Russian citizens of Tajikistan, apparently belonging to the State Security Ministry troops), and a Tajik policeman. Several civilians... MORE

The Communist faction in Russia's Duma is facing a rebellion by backbenchers threatening to break away to found a new centrist faction, to be called the Russian Industrial Union (RIU). (Interfax, RTR, February 5-6) The creation of the new faction would threaten the Communists' parliamentary... MORE

Two correspondents for Russia's ORT television channel, kidnapped January 18 on the road between Djohar-gala and Nazran, were finally freed yesterday. The release was carried out jointly by Chechen and Russian law enforcement agencies with the active participation of Security Council deputy secretary Boris Berezovsky,... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin's press secretary, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, has angrily denied media reports that the president's wife, Naina, has urged Yeltsin to leave office because of the state of his health. Yastrzhembsky also denied a report that he himself had not seen Yeltsin in person for... MORE